It didn’t take long for a groundswell of public opinion to start pushing against the Confederate battle flag. Walmart, Sears, eBay, and Amazon have stepped forward to say they are not going to continue selling the stars and bars. Also:

Next we should get rid of Jefferson Davis Highway, and rename the last high school in the country named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the founders of the KKK.

It seems like it’s coming very quickly, doesn’t it? Public opinion is shifting decisively. All my life I’ve heard people saying that the Civil War was not really about slavery, and blah blah blah, but those old stories don’t stand up any more. They’re too easily disproven.

If you’re the jerk I recently unfriended on Facebook, you might think this is all reactionary bullshit that accomplishes nothing, but I have to lay a giant NOPE on that. There’s no serious argument to be made that the stars and bars belongs on US government buildings. It’s a flag of treason. US soldiers were shot by rebels marching under it. There’s no serious argument to be made that the flag has nothing to do with white supremacy. It was flown in a rebellion fought over the keeping of slaves, and it has been resurgent since the fifties as a giant fuck you to the civil rights movement.

Taking down one flag, changing the name of a school or highway, or moving a statue into a museum isn’t going to solve all of our problems with racism. They don’t have to. These victories are cumulative.

And they matter. They may seem like petty things on their own, but taken together they form the gigantic foundation I was talking about last week.

There’s change to be made in communities far from us and in our own neighborhoods. Make your voice heard.